TV Channel ZIK speaks of possible provocation by the police

The General Producer of TV ZIK, Dmytro Dobrodomov has stated publicly that he has information that the police have been given tacit instructions to carry out acts of provocation against journalists.

He noted that in the last 10 days there had been two attacks on the channel’s journalists, and said that the police response had been extremely passive, with no criminal investigation launched.

The first attack was on the head of a special project called “101 Rescue Service”, Oksana Sakharevych and cameraman Yury Pyzhenkov while preparing a feature on the results of a fire at a combine in which one person died and another received serious injuries. A local farmer inflicted bodily injuries on the journalist and set his dogs on the filming crew. Oksana Sakharevych reported this to the police immediately.

On 15 November near the Lviv Arena Stadium, two individuals came up to a filming crew and demanded that they wipe the video footage, tried to wrench the video cassette by force and threatened them.

Oksana Martynovych, head of the given project  (“2012 building”) said that the whole episode was watched by a police officer. He not only did not intervene, but supported those unknown individuals, also demanding that we wipe the video footage”.

They reported the incident immediately, but were only contacted yesterday and asked to make statements.

The channel reports that the police have refused to comment. As of Tuesday evening, there is a short report on the MIA website saying that all necessary checks were carried out.

Dmytro Dobrodomov asserts that the police and Prosecutor’s office will not merely failure to initiate investigations, but also undertake acts of provocation against the channel’s journalists. He claims that this is due to a number of highly publicized features on the channel about the activities of the police. One was over the theft of weapons from the Lviv MIA University.  He says that he was approached and told to not run the story.  Another involves possible land allocation fiddles.

From a report at the Information for Mass Information